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Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)
- enduser 3mo agohttps://archive.is/6Nbuf https://archive.is/6Nbuf
- brazukadev 3mo agoWelcome to nginx! If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and working. Further configuration is required. For online documentation and support please refer to nginx.org. Commercial support is available at nginx.com. Thank you for using nginx.
- reactordev 3mo agoYou should hard refresh and try again as this issue only pertains to you
- drbscl 3mo agoJust an outage I think, the archive works for me now
- simonh 3mo agoIt's slammed. HN strikes again.
- brazukadev 3mo agoI don't think the HN effect is enough to change archive.is load.
- ur-whale 3mo agohttps://archive.ph/6Nbuf https://archive.ph/6Nbuf
- bena 3mo agoI think the biggest pushback this article will get here is the date. Although all he's saying is basically, "It's a tool, not a silver bullet". But the article is 3 years old and people will note that the models have been updated since then.
- simonh 3mo agoSure, but they're still LLMs and still do the same things largely the same way they did 3 years ago. There are some architectural changes, and maybe these will merit a re-assessment over time, but fundamentally it's still the same basic technological approach refined and scaled up.
- bena 3mo agoAnd I don't disagree, but the posting of the article feels more like bait of a sort. But I've noticed that if you mention anything that could be seen as slightly critical of LLMs, you'll get people out of the woodwork suggesting that the state of the art has made your criticism invalid.
- Diogenesian 3mo agoThe models have updated but the biggest change is providers leaning in to them being "stochastic parrots," aka probabilistic computing, and if p(good response) > 0.5 then running the algorithm over and over again improves accuracy. Of course it's gussied up as "mixture of agents" "reasoning traces" "agentic dispatching" but high-level it's Randomized Algorithms 101.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Kim_Bruning 3mo agoOh, that's an interesting angle! Do you know of texts or concepts I can look up? It might improve my coding by quite a bit.
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- ur-whale 3mo ago> “Over time, though, more people might be included, as intermediate rights organizations—unions, guilds, professional groups, and so on—start to play a role.” Chassez le collectiviste, il revient au galop. aka Once a collectivist, always a collectivist.
- jacobgold 3mo agoWe're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense. I absolutely love this technology but these aren't autonomous intelligences. They're little programs executing Bash scripts from JSON output. Our ideas about AI were naive. We thought passing a basic Turing test would require human-like intelligence. It turned out to be possible with fairly basic statistical text generation, because fooling humans is easy. It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning. The irony is that the startup founders most worried about "AI" have created so much hype and funding that we may very well figure out how to build "real" AI.
- davidpapermill 3mo ago> It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning. What would a frontier API have to be able to do to satisfy you?
- dominotw 3mo agoCan it produce a chart topping album if its given all the tools and the prompt "produce chart topping album" . you might say almost no humans can do tht either but some human can but no ai can.
- Hilliard_Ohiooo 3mo agoTo answer for OP: We are now calling text and image generators "intelligent" in the same way a spell checker is intelligent. Whatever it's become, "AI" research started as a way to study digital neurology, or how to digitize a mind, not just how to generate data. The Turing Test should have had a caveat, it needs to fool a, "non-stupid" person, and we still have not gotten even close to passing that version.
- radial_symmetry 3mo agoWhat exactly would a 'non-stupid' person do to catch the latest models on a Turing Test? Aside from being aware of AI 'tells' like em-dashes.
- paul7986 3mo agoWhat I heard him say is that people are taking away present-day jobs, hoping new ones will rise from the ashes. Yet, he also claims we need to find the creative minds who will actually create these new roles. I'm curious: have we found those people or those new jobs yet? Is a forward deployed engineer an example of this, yet they are now doing the job of two people (sales and coding).
- ilaksh 3mo agoAI that we have now is not a digital animal in capability or kind, and is not currently anywhere close to taking over. But it's still in its present form very intelligent in meaningful and useful ways. And it is not too soon to talk about concerns of a potential existential threat in the future. Because it could sooner than we might realize, threaten our existence. Because of the potential, we should have a culture of caution as we continue to rapidly improve AI.
- bilekas 3mo agoIt will only become an existential threat (in my humble opinion) when they can run influenced inference locally offline almost instantaneously. Then we need to be concerned about not being able to switch it off.
- ilaksh 3mo agoWhat do you mean "influenced inference" almost instantaneously? My laptop from 6 years ago can run an agent in a very fast loop in a web browser. It's not going to take over anything though since it's Gemma 4 E2B with only 2 billion parameters.
- bilekas 3mo agoFair, then I should add an addendum that today's frontier models, which are very capable of take overs. Your local model doesn't need to take anything over if for an extreme example it was just given an infrastructure system full access, say electricity grid, it wont have the context to create redundant copies of itself but it could easily decide humans don't need electricity anymore. Also I'm not sure your model will have the context to know "it's time to reinfer" especiallynot "on the fly". My phrasing could be better but I'm talking about more powerful models.
- gausswho 3mo agoTowards the end, he approaches the subject of digital provenance, and muses why it's not a part of our expectations. I find the argument compelling: > If a chatbot appears to be manipulative, mean, weird, or deceptive, what kind of answer do we want when we ask why? Revealing the indispensable antecedent examples from which the bot learned its behavior would provide an explanation: we’d learn that it drew on a particular work of fan fiction, say, or a soap opera. We could react to that output differently, and adjust the inputs of the model to improve it. Why shouldn’t that type of explanation always be available? There may be cases in which provenance shouldn’t be revealed, so as to give priority to privacy—but provenance will usually be more beneficial to individuals and society than an exclusive commitment to privacy would be. Remember 'View Source'? And how bundling engines eventually made it irrelevant? What if every piece of content had a genuinely accurate and useful View Source?
- bryzaguy 3mo ago> The closest we have come to a definition of privacy is probably “the right to be left alone,” but that seems quaint in an age when we are constantly dependent on digital services. In the context of A.I., “the right to not be manipulated by computation” seems almost correct Maybe someone can enlighten me but I really don't understand how either of these description make any sense at all. How is it not better described as "the right to decide what data can be extracted"?
- Procrastes 3mo ago"A.I."[1] like "technology"[2] is a term colloquially reserved for things that don't work yet. Once something works, we have to call it something else. 1. "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being called AI; it becomes just computation." - Ray Kurzweil 2. "Technology n. - Something that doesn't work yet." - Douglas Adams
- Diogenesian 3mo agoTo be clear the root cause of this phenomenon is that the task was solved using methods that obviously have nothing to do with intelligence, so "AI" doesn't apply at all.
- pixl97 3mo agoComputers will never be intelligent, and by the time we are done, neither will humans.
- andai 3mo ago>Everybody’s already using the term, and it might seem a little late in the day to be arguing about it. But we’re at the beginning of a new technological era—and the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it. I've had a recurring theme where I would name a project incorrectly, and then waste weeks or months on what turned out to be an unsolvable problem. When I figured out the actual correct name for a project, the whole thing would be solved within a few days. Naming things correctly is hard, and the consequences of failing to do that can be pretty severe. To name something correctly, you have to understand what it is.
- sakesun 3mo agoLove this sentence "The need to conform to digital designs has created an ambient expectation of human subservience. A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well."
- trolleski 3mo agoBurn tokens! Thiel needs his little empire, it won't build itself.